Library Student ToolBox: Your Research Strategy

We suggest following these steps when writing essays and presentations:

a. Clarify the scope of your essay (e.g. a deep-dive vs. a bird’s eye view of the topic);

b. Clearly identify the topic of your essay.

In order to do so, you should ask questions about the individuals concerned (Who?), the time frame (Recent past? Present?), and geographic area (In Canada? In Ontario? In Québec?).

Afterwards, we put together all these elements in a complex sentence; ideally, you should have a long sentence, formulated as a question.

For example: What is the impact of the Ontario job market integration programs on the university graduates in the last decade?

1. Break down your topic into concepts (keywords)

          In order to come up with the right keywords for your Omni/databases searches, think about a journal article on our previous topic: integrating young Ontarians to job market. Which keywords would you expect the article to feature?

2. Find synonyms

For each of your keywords, try to find synonyms and similar terms. Here are some tips:

1. Think of  other words in the same word family;
2. Use acronyms.

3. Putting keywords to use

When you are searching in Omni and in our databases, group your keywords by their stems and use a very useful feature named truncation: e.g. polic* will retrieve “police, policing, policeman, policemen.

You can try to search for your keywords as an exact phrase: simply include them between quotation marks. This type of search will identify the words in their exact order, without separating them e.g. “police violence”.

Things to remember:

1. Accents and capitalization do not count;
2. Google performs a search for synonyms by default
3. Google does not use truncation!
4. The sign “?” replaces zero/one letter: e.g. “colo?r” retrieves both “colour” and “color”;
5. Do not use general terms like causes, effects, trends, benefits, impact. These words are overused by authors and will not bring any value to your search.

*This guide used as inspiration similar content developed by Concordia University and UQÀM.

When you evaluate a journal article, ask yourself three questions:

a) How good are its contents?

b) Is it pertinent to my project?

c) How reliable is the author?

a) Quality of content: this one is easy! Answer: look at the source. Is the source an academic journal (e.g. American Journal of Sociology) or for general interest like Slate.com?

Also, not all academic journals are the same. The top of the crop are peer-reviewed journals (peer-reviewing means that, in order to be published, the article had been read and critiqued by other scholars). You can identify peer-reviewed journals if you use Ulrich's database (https://biblio.uottawa.ca/en/databases). Each peer-reviewed journal has the symbol of a hockey referee shirt by its title.

b) Pertinence to my project: still an easy one if you know what to look for! 

- read the title, the summary and the keywords (pro tip: if you read the key words you can add them to your list of synonyms we discussed in the sections above);

- skim the introduction and read the conclusion carefully;

- read the titles of the sections.

c) Author's/editor's reliability:

- who's publishing the journal (a research institute, a ministry, a university, a trade association) ? Answer: Check publisher's website and read about their mission.

- Is the journal geared towards a large vs. an academia audience? Answer: See if the journal is peer-reviewed. If yes, it means it is an academic journal.

- Are there professional & biographical details about the author? Answer: Such details are found either on the first or last page of the article. Alternatively, just google her/his name. Pro tip: see if this person published other books/ articles in the same area. If yes, she stands good chances to be an authority in the field.   

*This guide used as inspiration similar content developed by Concordia University and UQÀM.